Game Plan
Posted by Stephen Green · 10 August 2004
Before 9/11, we almost always knew how to win a war  even the people who weren't in favor of fighting it.

Plenty of people thought we should have just let the Confederate states go their own way in 1861  but even they knew that if we beat General Lee on the field and occupied enough of the South, that the CSA would cry uncle and quit.

The First World War? Same story. Before President Wilson asked Congress for a war declaration, pro-German sentiment was pretty evenly divided with pro-English sentiment. But once war was declared, everybody knew  drive on to Berlin, and the world would be made safe for democracy. Except the Germans called it quits before the Anglo-Franco-American allies even crossed the frontier, so WWI never quite ended for the Germans. And that brings us, naturally, to the Second World War.

Not a whole lot of pro-German sentiment here for that one, unless you count some of the really fringe members of the America First brigades. (If I need to refer to them later, we'll call Charles Lindberg, Joe Kennedy & Co. the "Proto-Buchananites.") Even after Pearl Harbor, there were still a few pacifists in the country, however  but somewhere in their hearts, they knew the war would be won once we had soldiers occupying Berlin and Tokyo.

And so it went. We did those things, we won those wars.

Nuclear weapons and our first-ever defensive alliances complicated matters. Did we win in Korea, by simply holding the line? Or should victory have been defined as reuniting all of Korea under a friendly government in Seoul? Or, since the Chinese proved to be our real foe after Inchon, should we have considered anything less than deposing the Beijing regime to have been something less than victory?

Click to expand...

As I said, nuclear arms and defensive alliances complicated things for us greatly. Our alliances forced us into wars we couldn't quite win (because of the nuclear threat), in order to avoid greater losses in future wars (which would have run even greater nuclear risks). Or, to put it in the kind of language I prefer to use when discussing politics, the Cold War sucked.

If you think war has become complex, peace is messier still  and always has been.

Nobody ever knows what the peace will look like. Let's use our examples from earlier. Even as late as Appomattox, who could have predicted the KKK, Jim Crow, or Radical Reconstruction? No statesmen in 1914 knew that the war they were about to unleash would result in 20 million deaths, Russian Communism, or Nazi Germany. World War II?

Click to expand...

NOTE: That's what gets me about all the complaints that President Bush "didn't have a plan" to "win the peace" in Iraq. Oh, blow me. Nobody ever has a plan for the peace. Or if they do, it will prove useless. "No peace plan survives the last battle" is the VodkaPundit corollary to Clausewitz's dictum that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

By now, you probably know where I'm going with this little history lesson: How do we define victory in the Terror War, and what will the peace look like.

Let's get the second part out of the way first.

What will the peace look like? I don't have a damn clue. And neither do you. And if you meet anyone who claims to know, feel free to laugh at them really hard. So hard, you get a little spit on their face. Sometimes, justice can be small and spiteful  ask a meter maid. Anyway.

When peace comes, it could look like whatever Mecca, Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, Pyongyang, Khartoum, Kabul, Cairo, etc., look like after being hit by big city-busting nuclear warheads. Or it could end with the entire Arab and Muslim world looking like the really well-manicured bits of Connecticut. My best guess is, somewhere in-between. But that's only a guess.

You're right, though. I often wondered about this. This won't end with the fall of a city or with the capture of a man. It won't end with the signing of a treaty or a parade down Broadway. It won't end with the collapse of an empire.

How will we know when it is over? How will we know we have defeated the threat of terrorism and eliminated the ideology of extremism?

My best guess is this: it is not our generation's job to worry about that. It is our children's. It is our job to make sure our children won't have to worry about fighting terrorism. If we fight terrorism... we may give them a chance to defeat terrorism.

The next ten to twenty years won't look very good in terms of "will it ever end?" It will. But after we "fight" terrorists, dismantle all networks and cells, remove all regimes and sponsors of terror, and capture all high value target individuals, we still have more work to do in terms of politically transforming that region in the world.

We first need to reduce the threat of terrorism to defeat the nature of extremism.

In the end, however, future generations of Arabs won't grow up in totalitarian regimes that preach terrorism. There will be no terrorist networks, and if there are any terrorist networks, they are small and regional, and they will be eliminated by Arab governments. There will be no high value terrorists at large, and if there are, they will be hunted down by EVERYBODY. And there will be no terrorist regimes.

Maybe I'm caught up in semantics on this one but there will always be some group who is frustrated in some fashion by the status quo. Will these people who attempt to gring about change be called terrorists or revolutionaries? Naturally one argument will be the methods that these people use to bring about change and who it is they are "attacking". IMHO, "terrorism" will always exist in some fashion and "targets" will vary. Critizing someone for not having a plan for peace is as silly as asking someone to preduct the future.

What will victory look like? It'll look like a peaceful and proseperous America, free of Golan Cipel and his buddies. Arabs won't hate us because Jews won't steer us that way. We will rise up and say "NO!" to their efforts to hijack our foreign policy and military.

Useful Searches

About USMessageBoard.com

USMessageBoard.com was founded in 2003 with the intent of allowing all voices to be heard. With a wildly diverse community from all sides of the political spectrum, USMessageBoard.com continues to build on that tradition. We welcome everyone despite political and/or religious beliefs, and we continue to encourage the right to free speech.

Come on in and join the discussion. Thank you for stopping by USMessageBoard.com!